24
The Changing Media Representation of T. E. Lawrence and Celebrity Culture in Britain, 1919-1935.
This article presents a new analysis of representations of T. E. Lawrence to explore how the media created celebrity identities in interwar Britain.[1] Lawrence’s life-story is well known, from his military campaign in the Arabian Desert during the First World War, through his emergence onto the public stage in American journalist Lowell Thomas’s touring travelogue, and because of his later attempts to evade the media’s limelight.[2] While several scholars have examined Lawrence’s cultural significance, Graham Dawson’s important study demonstrated how Thomas’s travelogue presented Lawrence as an imperial soldier hero for the 1920s, his complex public image tailored to alleviate social anxieties regarding the instability of British masculinities in this period.[3] With the growing modernist interest in subjective interiority, Dawson also showed how later biographies presented psychological readings of Lawrence’s actions. Most recently, Priya Satia has argued that the press exploited Lawrence’s mysterious reputation to peddle rumours about the secret activities of the British state in the Middle East, turning him into the ‘poster-boy’ for new practices of imperial governance.[4]
Although these studies quote newspapers, no scholar has mapped Lawrence’s changing media representation in any detail. The following article examines Lawrence’s appearance in seventeen national newspapers and in newsreels between 1919 and 1935, to show how earlier press depictions that largely followed Lowell Thomas’s portrayal of an imperial adventurer were transformed by a nascent media-driven celebrity culture that aimed to uncover intimate details of the lives of the famous.[5] Satia rightly identified how some newspapers presented Lawrence as the ‘arch spy of the world’ when he returned to England in 1929 after his time in India, but this image of him as an imperial adventurer was already in decline.[6] By then, the press’s attention had switched from Lawrence as a hero of empire to focus on the intensely private man who lay behind the public image of the ‘Blonde Bedouin’.[7] This shift in emphasis revealed a significant change in the way the media constructed celebrity in interwar Britain. In the early 1920s, the public identities of famous people like Lawrence went uncontested by the press, journalists collectively reproducing his image as a mysterious adventurer. However, over the course of the 1920s, reporters increasingly challenged the image of the imperial hero as they developed an acute interest in the man behind the persona, newspapers intensifying their exposure of celebrities’ private lives to foster emotional connections between the British mass public and famous individuals.
Celebrity culture has received growing attention from scholars in recent years.[8] In charting how the production of fame has altered over time, historians have utilized concepts devised by cultural theorists such as Graeme Turner, who has argued that celebrities are made when ‘media interest in their activities is transferred from reporting on their public role… to investigating the details of their private lives.’[9] Representation of the celebrity’s private life enables media audiences to empathize with him or her.[10] Charles Ponce de Leon’s important research identified how a modern American celebrity culture formed between 1890 and 1940 that was geared towards the exposure of the ‘real’ self which the media claimed lay behind celebrities’ public identities.[11] This focus on the ‘real’ self corresponded with the emergence of new modes of self-fashioning, with scholars positioning the interwar period as a formative moment in the emergence of modern interiorized subjectivity. Sharon Marcus has recently commented how ‘psychoanalytic theory popularized introspection and encouraged individuals to develop elaborate individual mythologies’.[12] The conceptualization of the ‘self within’ emerged contemporaneously with the belief that self-actualization was to be achieved through emotional fulfilment in private life, instigating a shift in self-fashioning that was fully realized in Britain’s post-war culture of domesticity.[13] The interwar media thus exposed celebrities’ private lives to offer audiences access to what was increasingly deemed to be the ‘real’ selves of the famous individuals. Laura Beers has used the term ‘political celebrity’ to describe the interwar Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson, identifying how her popularity was enhanced through newspaper human-interest stories on her private life which amplified the affective affinity between her and Britain’s female readership.[14] Journalists also devised new narrative themes and rhetorical devices to imbue their insights into celebrities’ private lives with authenticity.[15] Matt Houlbrook’s recent work has shown how a fixation with authenticity influenced interwar reporters who tried to infuse the life stories of people who ‘faked it’ like the ‘criminal vamp’ Josephine O’Dare with verisimilitude.[16] This article’s analysis of Lawrence’s media image builds on the work of Ponce de Leon and Houlbrook to show how newspapers and newsreels used new linguistic and visual strategies to expose what they projected as his ‘real’ self. This article argues that the media’s special investment in the creation of insights into Lawrence’s private life was characteristic of a new British celebrity culture which, in accordance with the popularization of understandings of the interiorized self, prioritized personal revelation ahead of public appearance.
The first two sections of this article chart the rise and fall of Lawrence’s press image as an imperial adventurer. The first section shows how, on learning that Lawrence was hiding at an airbase as an aircraftman in 1922, reporters cast him in a similar role to the ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ figure created by Lowell Thomas. The press’s portrayal of him as a secret agent corresponded with a popular conspiracy culture that encircled the British government and was meant to attract readers attuned to sensational stories of public deception. The second section offers a re-evaluation of the 1929 ‘arch-spy of the world’ rumours which Satia identified to argue that, by the end of the decade, the public image of Lawrence as an adventurer had been superseded by investigations into his desire for peaceful anonymity. Extravagant tales of government duplicity were replaced with press reports which discussed Lawrence’s personal motivations for avoiding publicity.
Examining the contradictions inherent in Lawrence’s media coverage in the late 1920s, the third section of this article reveals how journalists sought to create an image of his ‘real’ self. It follows Tom Mole’s recent work on Lord Byron to examine how Lawrence influenced his celebrity image.[17] Whilst Byron used his writings to cultivate new forms of intimacy with his readers, Lawrence developed a reputation for self-effacement by embracing anonymity as an aircraftman.[18] By keeping journalists and photographers at bay, Lawrence helped construct a persona that was distinguished by its remoteness, frustrating the media’s attempts to expose his ‘real’ self. This frustration fed into a new media discourse in which the press contested reluctant celebrities’ behaviour, disputing their claims to modesty and complaining that they neglected their public responsibility. At a time of growing anxiety about how public figures communicated their social authority to the new audiences of interwar mass media, the press and newsreels sought to expose famous peoples’ private lives to create empathetic links with members of the mass public which would strengthen concepts of trust and leadership. Despite Lawrence’s unwillingness to court publicity, the media therefore devised techniques to try to produce what were meant to appear as authentic first-hand insights into his ‘real’ self.
The final section of this article illuminates the shift in Lawrence’s media representation from adventurer to reluctant celebrity by offering the first analysis of his visual iconography between the wars. During his lifetime, Lawrence’s visual representation in newspapers and newsreels was mysterious, muddled and characterized by distance between media audiences and the celebrity subject. However, following his fatal motorcycle accident in May 1935, new visual images of him emerged which the media used to present readers and viewers with a more intimate, private vision of Lawrence, in an attempt to create a more relatable, human figure with whom the public could empathize.
Aircraftman John Hume Ross
Lawrence’s media image was at its least complex in the years immediately after the First World War. As Dawson has identified, the American journalist Lowell Thomas presented him as an imperial war hero and brought him to the attention of the English-speaking world in his multimedia travelogue, ‘With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia’, which he delivered to four million people in London, the British provinces and the Empire.[19] Thomas presented Lawrence as a brave and intellectually brilliant figure who had dedicated himself to the goals of British victory and Arab independence. According to Thomas, Lawrence united the Arabs by becoming one of them, donning the flowing white robes of a Bedouin and, with their support, performed daring acts of gallantry and clandestine attacks against the Ottoman Turks. According to Dawson, Thomas’s image of Lawrence revived the courage and integrity of British masculinity that had been destabilized by the industrialized conflict on the Western Front and offered a justification for the sacrifice of the war years.[20] Thomas also serialized his Lawrence story in the Strand Magazine under the title ‘The Uncrowned King of Arabia’. Famed for its fictional stories like Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries, the Strand articles amplified the fantasy of Lawrence’s wartime exploits. In 1920, newspapers noted that the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, had expressed admiration for Thomas’s creation: ‘everything that Mr. Lowell Thomas tells us about Colonel Lawrence is true. In my opinion Colonel Lawrence is one of the most remarkable and romantic figures of modern times.’[21] The Times and Observer referred to Thomas as an authoritative source on Lawrence, echoing the journalist’s colourful language in their accounts of his ‘romantic and victorious campaign’, the ‘supernatural powers’ that he had exercised over the Arabian tribes, and the ‘miracles’ he had performed on the battlefield.[22]
Such dramatic descriptions in both the elite and popular press forged an image of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ which straddled the boundary between reality and fantasy. Lawrence originally believed he could further the geopolitical interests of the Arabs by letting Thomas tell a version of his story, but later felt the American exploited his reputation for commercial gain, ruefully remarking to a friend that ‘in the history of the world (cheap edition) I’m a sublimated Aladdin, the thousand and second Knight, a Strand-Magazine strummer.’[23] He also felt overwhelmed by the media’s subsequent misrepresentation of him and, in August 1922, secretly enlisted in the ranks of the RAF under the assumed name John Hume Ross, in an effort to regain his anonymity.
Lawrence’s peace was short-lived. On 27 December 1922, the front-page story of the Daily Express announced that he had enlisted as a private in the British Army and was living ‘unknown and unrecognised, performing humdrum barrack routine, in a dull garrison town.’[24] The report was inaccurate. Lawrence was actually training as an aircraftman with the photography section at an air base in Farnborough, but this fabrication was typical of the newspaper coverage which surrounded him. For two weeks the Express and Daily Mail had been investigating rumours that he was stationed at a military facility. The Express had published its discoveries without verification because it was vital to scoop the story ahead of the Mail.[25] Furthermore, as his earlier press coverage had proven, facts counted for little in Lawrence’s case and so a torrent of misinformation continued to flow from Fleet Street. The Express was joined by a chorus of voices, each speculating why the ‘Uncrowned King of Arabia’ had gone into hiding as Aircraftman John Hume Ross.[26] The Daily Sketch was the only paper to directly pose the question otherwise implicit in the press’s reaction: ‘why has Colonel Lawrence started again in a much more lowly position than he ever occupied before?’[27]
At a time when military rank was innately bound to social class it seemed unthinkable that Lawrence would voluntarily choose to join the ordinary rank and file alongside men deemed his inferiors. Nor did the fledgling Air Force carry the same cultural cachet as the Royal Navy or Army. Some reporters therefore conjectured that Lawrence’s enrollment concealed a secret motive. For example, the Sketch stated ‘the official explanation that he desires “peace and quiet” for a forthcoming literary work is deliciously ingenious.’[28] In fact, Lawrence had, indeed, intended to use the solitude of the barracks to complete the first full text of his now famous war memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, but this scrap of truth was lost in rumours like that spread by the News of the World, which proclaimed ‘there is something that this indefatigable searcher after knowledge knew the RAF could teach him, or somewhere it was going where he desired to go also.’[29] Stephen Heathorn has examined the widespread suspicion of a state cover-up which circulated around the death of Lord Kitchener aboard the HMS Hampshire in 1916, and how enterprising self-publicists exploited these suspicions for commercial gain.[30] In much the same way, a commercial incentive drove speculation about Lawrence’s motives for joining the RAF. The press produced this kind of conspiracy theory that targeted the military authorities in order to entice the attention of readers. As Heathorn acknowledges, politicians proved unwilling to speak out to dispel conjecture for fear of inciting even greater media speculation.[31] Yet, equally, the Air Ministry’s refusal to respond to the press’s enquiries on Lawrence only served to fuel speculation about his ostensibly mysterious behaviour.
As early as 1922, newspapers thus constructed a popular image of Lawrence which incorporated far more duplicitous characteristics than previously acknowledged by historians. The press reported that he was on a secret assignment in Farnborough and proclaimed him a ‘master of disguise’.[32] The Daily Mirror went as far to state that ‘he has chosen the horizon-blue uniform of a private in the Air Force as the latest of his many disguises… his comrades in the ranks are unaware of his identity.’[33] Lawrence then can be situated alongside the crooks and confidence tricksters who distinguished interwar popular culture. Angus McLaren has argued that shifts in class, gender and racial systems created a society ‘preoccupied by dress and role playing, by visual codes and clues’, whilst Houlbrook has revealed the spectacular social mobility afforded conmen who successfully used disguise to masquerade as someone they were not.[34]